Full Description
Exploring a wide variety of visualizations of pregnancy and fetuses through 300 years of history, this timely volume offers a fresh look at the influential feminist concept of the "public fetus."
Images of pregnant and fetal bodies are today visible everywhere. Through ultrasound screenings at maternity clinics, birth videos on social media platforms, or antiabortion propaganda, visualizations of pregnancy are available and accessible as never before. The origins of today's visual culture of pregnancy are often traced back to the 1960s, when Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson's stunning photographs of human development were published in Life magazine and widely disseminated over the world. But the public display of pregnant and fetal bodies actually has a much longer and more complex history.
In this timely book, a group of scholars from a range of disciplines explores this multifaceted history by highlighting visualizations of pregnant and fetal bodies in a variety of geographical and cultural contexts, spanning a period of more than 300 years. By reengaging with the crucial concept of the "public fetus," coined by feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, the volume aims to revitalize the scholarly discussion on the visual culture of pregnancy and demonstrate the constructed nature of fetal images. Including chapters on a wide variety of representations in different media, such as wet specimen collections, papier-mâché models, sculpture, film, and photography, the book provides a much-needed argument against the widespread notion of the "universal" fetus.
On publication this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC-BY-NC-ND.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Rethinking the Public Fetus: An Introduction
Elisabet Björklund and Solveig Jülich
1. The Monsters of Peter and Wolff: Anatomical Preparations and Embryology in Eighteenth-Century St. Petersburg - Sara Ray
2. "What Does the Eye Have to Do with Obstetrics?" The Fetus between Sight and Touch in Eighteenth-Century Italy - Jennifer Kosmin
3. Paper Pregnancies: Visualizing the Maternal Body, 1870-1900 - Jessica M. Dandona
4. Biological Bodies, Unfettered Imaginations: The 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures and the Unexpected Origins of Modern Antiabortion Imagery - Rose Holz
5. Creating a Public for Visualized Pregnancies: The Swedish Version of the American Sex Hygiene Film Mom and Dad (1944) - Elisabet Björklund
6. The Drama of the Fetoplacental Unit: Reimagining the Public Fetus of Lennart Nilsson - Solveig Jülich
7. The Public Fetus in Franco's Spain: Women, Doctors, and Feminists in the Circulation of Pregnancy Images - María Jesús Santesmases
8. Visual Strategies of Antiabortion Activism and Their Feminist Critique: The Public Fetus in the United States - Nick Hopwood
9. Public Menstruation: Visualizing Periods in Art, Activism, and Advertising - Camilla Mørk Røstvik
10. From "Anatomical Specimen" to "Almost Child": Pictures of Dead Fetuses in France - Anne-Sophie Giraud
11. Reproducing Bodies in the Medical Museum: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Fetus on Display - Manon S. Parry
12. The Public Fetus: A Traveling Concept - Solveig Jülich and Elisabet Björklund
List of Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
